He shoved the last, portly delegate aside, his boots skidding on the smooth, cold stone rim of the Scrying Basin. The air was a wall of noise—the deep, bone-shaking toll of the war-bells from the canals below, the panicked shouts of the Parliament, the high-pitched crackle of failing temporal stabilizers. He and Seraphina had reached the eye of the storm, a ten-foot circle of polished black obsidian that churned with uncontrolled light.
Across the floor, Kellan Shaw had seen them. The Conclave ambassador’s face, a mask of smug certainty moments before, was now twisted with cold fury. He pointed, a single, sharp gesture.
— Stop them! — Shaw’s voice was a razor, slicing through the chaos.
His personal guards, four men in charcoal-grey uniforms with the flat, dead eyes of repossessed furniture, began to push through the crowd. They moved with a brutal, logical efficiency, shoving Seers aside like inconvenient variables. They were thirty feet away and closing. The window was shrinking.
Seraphina did not look at the approaching guards. Her eyes were fixed on the basin. She placed her palms flat on its turbulent surface, and Kaelen felt a change in the air, a pressure drop like the moment before a lightning strike. The wild, chaotic light within the obsidian bowl, a reflection of the room’s panic, began to smooth out. The churning waves of energy settled, the surface becoming a placid, receptive mirror of black water. She was holding the storm at bay with nothing but her will, and her T-Minus display, a steady blue just minutes ago, flickered with the strain.
— Now, Kaelen! — she gasped, her voice tight.
He didn’t hesitate. He trusted the plan. He trusted her. That was the whole of it. He pulled the cracked obsidian charm from his pocket. His fingers, trained to find flaws in ledgers and machinery, found a tiny, almost invisible maintenance port on the basin’s rim, a detail no Seer would ever look for. The charm, a piece of their world, clicked into the port, a piece of his. A circuit was completed.
He closed his eyes. He didn’t try to think. He didn’t try to code or analyze. He just remembered. He let the memory he had kept locked away for five years flood into him. The sterile white of the tribunal room. The confused, terrified face of the weaver. The Head Arbiter’s voice, scrubbed of all humanity. And the Hourglass Shard, pulsing with a sickly green light as it turned a man to a pile of grey dust. He focused on the energy signature, the cold, parasitic feel of it, the foundational data of his own damnation.
He poured all of it—the guilt, the failure, the rage, the cold, hard data of the shard’s signature—into the charm. He was taking the single most private and shameful moment of his life and making it public. This was the price of their gambit. Not his time, not his status. His soul, laid bare for everyone to see. He was burning his past to give them a future.
The Scrying Basin screamed.
It was not a sound, but a visual shriek of corrupted data. The placid black surface erupted. It didn't show a clear image, but a layered, ghostly nightmare projected into the air for the entire Parliament to witness. A temporal palimpsest, raw and bleeding. Kellan Shaw’s face, cold and cruel, handing a data-chit to a fawning Lucius Thorne. The shimmering blue of Seraphina’s resonance signature, but it was wrong, glitching and unstable, a forgery woven over her true pattern. And then the final, damning image: the sickly green pulse of the Hourglass Shard, the exact same one Lucius had wielded, overlaid with the stark, geometric seal of the Cog-Mind Conclave.
A wave of horrified silence washed over the chamber, a silence more profound than the chaos it replaced. The truth, ugly and undeniable, hung in the air.
The Conclave guards were five feet away. Kaelen felt a hand shove a rough clay cup into his. Seraphina. It was the awful tea. He glanced down, and in the sludge of dregs at the bottom, he saw it without thinking, without translating. Two hard, straight lines closing in from the sides. He understood it not as a symbol, but as a fact.
— Flankers, — he breathed, turning to stand back-to-back with her.
They braced themselves, surrounded. The broadcast was done. The truth was out. Kellan Shaw’s face was a mask of pure, murderous rage. The guards raised their stun batons. They were cornered, exposed, and out of time.
The ghostly images faded, leaving only the scent of ozone in the air. Dust motes, illuminated by the basin’s dying light, danced in the sudden quiet.
The truth was out, and the price was coming to collect.
